Hospitals and medical offices in the United States handle millions of requests for prescription refills a day from pharmacies seeking to meet patients needs. These requests are typically handled in one of the following three ways. The pharmacy may leave a voice mail message that is transcribed by hand. The prescription is then authorized by the physician and called back to the pharmacy over the telephone or transcribed again and faxed to the pharmacy. Alternately, the pharmacy faxes the prescription request to the physician's office and the physician approves the fax and faxes it back to the pharmacy. In many cases the fax is unclear and the physician's office must telephone the pharmacy for clarification. Finally, the pharmacy may send a written form over the internet, either through e-mail or as a completed form using a prescription generation service.
Each of the above methods suffers from disadvantages. Listening to voice mail prescription requests and transcribing these requests is time consuming and expensive. Additionally, there are 89,000 unique prescriptions available for dispensing in the U.S. today, many of them with similar sounding names. For example, Celebrex is an arthritis drug, Cerebyx is a seizure drug and Celexa is an antidepressant, each of which has been mistaken for the other in clinical settings. Voice systems, which rely on transcribing information by hand, create the opportunity for physicians to make prescription errors. Faxed prescription requests are often hard to read because of poor transmission quality. Electronic communication of prescription requests is the most accurate, but with many physician's in the US not having computers in their office, the penetration of this technology is low. Also, physicians and pharmacies do not communicate about drugs in the same manner. Pharmacies use a numerical identification and physicians almost exclusively use brand marketing or generic nomenclature. The available systems that deal with prescription requests allow the pharmacy to identify the patient from a preexisting database and then record a voice message defining the drug and dosage being requested.
Current Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems allow users to call a specified telephone number and, using DTMF tones or the human voice, navigate a menu to various application modules (i.e. services). These automated systems provide voice messages to a user over a telephone line and process the user's tone type telephone key presses (DTMF tones) as input. The messages played by the system can be tape recorded human voice messages or machine generated speech. These systems answer the telephone call and begin interacting with the user automatically.
IVR systems may require the entry of an account number, customer number, or password before access to the application modules is allowed. Once in the module, the messages from the system can provide the user with information, prompt the user to enter data or make a selection from a variety of choices. For example, a message can state: “For choice A, press one; For choice B, press two; For choice C, press three.” If the number of choices is large, it may be necessary to present the choices in more than one menu. In that case, the final part of the message would prompt the user to provide a particular input in order to receive an additional message that lists other choices (i.e., “Press nine to hear more options”).
The user navigates through the system by providing appropriate input at each message to get to the next desired message or to activate a desired option. The user may gain access to information stored in one of the many databases. This information may be communicated using recorded human voice messages or machine generated speech. The user may also be allowed to take action based on a provided service. For example, a user may activate a newly issued credit card by entering personal identification information and card information. The user may also be able to enter information into the system either by using their voice to create a recording or by using their voice to cause the system to recognize words and their preprogrammed action. The user may also enter information using the tones generated on the telephone keypad. For example, a voice query may ask the user to input their telephone number using the keys on the telephone. In this case the user may have already identified himself by the use of a particular account name or personal identification number. The system may create a record of the identity of the user from a preprogrammed database and add to that record information that the user enters or selects, such as their telephone number.
Prior art allows for the selection of options to add to the newly created record from a pre-existing database. Though the creation of a database record is possible, most IVR systems are designed to provide information to users, or to allow users to take some action such as credit card activation. Most systems are not designed to create database records as their primary function.
A database is a set of information characteristics about a unique subject. Database tables are often stored in database programs on computer hard disks. IVR systems can be made to create records in database tables if these databases reside on computers with an IVR interface. In the table below, the database captures certain demographic information about the subject parties.
TABLE 1PatientLast nameFirst NameDate of BirthSocial SecurityNumberFoxTomFeb. 4, 1038476-32-9374FranklinWilkinsMariaDec. 23, 1954559-93-2836SimmsAndersonJulieJul. 15, 1972020-68-0022Hardgrove
The information can be sorted in many ways. For example, the database may be made to display all subjects who were born in a particular year or who have a particular first name. This stored information can be linked in relational databases. A relational database is a database that has the ability to link two or more database tables together using unique characteristics or keys.
Prior systems, however, do not adequately create an interactive relational database that captures specific information to make a medical decision regarding prescription drug use and, once the decision is made, execute the planned action of that decision. Prior art does not allow for the consolidation of this information into a database about specific patients for transmission to healthcare providers over fax and internet protocols. Additionally, the prior art does not provide the service of consolidating a patient's full range of active prescription drug regime that is bid out to various commercial entities using internet protocols.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide an interactive voice response system that allows for absolute identification of drug and dosage information.
It is another object of this invention to provide a system that links patient identification to a specific medical record held by the physician and creates a patient prescription history database.
It is another object of this invention to provide a system that makes databases available to practitioners using fax on demand and internet protocols.